Paper short abstract:

In March 2020, Cameroon closed its border due to Covid-19. An ethnography of the refugee strategies and aid policies and practices in the Eastern region highlights how the pandemic situation reset forced migration management, but also gave refugees the opportunity to (re)affirm their agency.

Paper long abstract:

In March 2020, Cameroon closed its borders because of the Covid-19 pandemic. Doing so, it challenged its official “open-door policy” towards refugees and accentuated a significant shift in humanitarian-security discourses and rationales.

In 2020-2021, we conducted an ethnography of refugee strategies and aid policies and practices in the eastern part of the country, at the border with Central African Republic. Our data highlight how aid actors supported the governmental strategy to ensure the compliance of refugee camps with movement restrictions and quarantine system, justified as necessary responses for both refugees’ and citizens’ safety. Going against the humanitarianization trend of the past decade, these measures enabled Cameroon’s decision makers to redefine existing migration governance, through biopolitical and spatial tactics that aim to restructure the border regime in the long term. In a context of increased border securitization and militarization, the humanitarian rationale and action play a crucial role in enforcing migrant containment.

However these exceptional measures, instead of increasing the side-lining of refugees, gave them the opportunity to subvert the modes of governmentality to which they are subject. Endowed with important know-how (developed over the years spent in refugee camps) but limited power-to-do (granted by the authorities and actors of the host country), refugees deployed mechanisms of transgression that enabled them to curb these processes of containment and marginalization. Their knowledge of the borderland and their ability to cross the borders despite their closure became valuable not only for themselves but also for local Cameroonians.